Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

Artificial intelligence and promises about the tech are everywhere these days. But excitement about genuine advances can easily veer into hype, according to Arvind Narayanan, computer science professor at Princeton who along with PhD candidate Sayash Kapoor wrote the book “AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference.”He says even the term AI doesn’t always mean what you think. The following is an edited transcript of his conversation with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino:Arvind Narayanan: AI is an umbrella term. It refers to a collection of loosely-related technologies. So many different products are called AI. In some ways, AI has certainly made remarkable progress. But in other cases, what is being sold as AI, first of all is 100-year-old statistics, simple formulas that are being rebranded as AI; but more importantly, it’s being used in situations where we should not expect AI or any other technology to work, like trying to predict a person’s future.